Yesterday I tried to format an old SSD and failed miserably. The drive is an Samsung 840 Evo, probably around 10 years old.
The drive had previously been the OS drive for an old MacBook which I no longer use. In windows disk management I saw that there were three partitions, an EFI system partition at 200mb, a primary partition where the majority of storage was located and a third one at like 600mb which I think was called something like "boot".
Since I now want to use the drive for storage only (no OS) I thought I might as well get rid of all of these partitions and format it to one. Disk manager wouldn't let me erase the EFI partition, which in retrospect I probably should have taken as a sign.
I google and find out how to erase it using diskpart and continue to do so. All partitions are now erased. But when I go to format it it refuses to do so giving me an error, "The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error" both in Disk Manager and diskpart. If I disconnect and reconnect it Disk manager loads slowly and then tells me it doesn't know if the drive is MBR or GPT. When trying to select one of them I again get the I/O error.
I also connected it to a Mac, but was not able to format it there either.
So, is there anything I can do to get my drive working again? And what exactly did I do wrong?
Thanks!
It sounds like when you removed the efi partition it probably wiped the i/o info that allowed the drive to connect to the computer. Since it was operating fine until you removed that partition. The efi partition does hold important information for the ssd to be able to operate.
I’m not that tech savvy with ssd’s but logically there has to be something that allows the ssd to know to connect to the computer. When you think bout it pen drives have a partition you cannot delete for this reason after you format them.
Based on This info it seems you have rendered that ssd completely unusable.
Nah the EFI partition only holds the data required to tell the BIOS/UEFI how to boot the operating system.
All the data on operating the SSD is stored as firmware in it's controller, it's not something you can accidentally erase.
Yeah, I suspect this as well. If this is the case I wonder if there's any way to restore that partition.
I honestly don’t know, but I did find this if you are working on windows or Mac. Warning this is probably. NOT free software.
https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/external-hard-drive-not-initialized.html